Star Trek: Legacy Review

From hell's heart, I stab at thee. Really.

At last year's E3, we were quite excited to see Mad Doc and Bethesda's progress on Star Trek: Legacy. Designed for the PC and the 360, the game seemed like a more accessible, prettier version of games like Bridge Commander and Klingon Academy. We confess we've always entertained delusions of being starship captains ourselves but seeing as how game reviewer isn't anywhere on that career track, we decided our best hope was to wait and live out our fantasy in virtual form. Now that the game is here, we can see that being a starship captain isn't nearly as fun as it first seemed.

But let's start with something good. It's tough to find a single story that ties together the original series, Next Generation and Enterprise (and throws in some references to Deep Space Nine and Voyager) but the game's writers have managed to pull it off quite well. You'll definitely have to draw some of your own connections between the eras if you want to follow the thread from Archer's first encounter to Picard's final showdown but it holds up well enough to provide reasonable continuity and framework for the game. Given that DC Fontana and Derek Chester are responsible for the story, it should please Trek fans.

Without giving too much away, the story starts with Captain Archer's attempts to help a female Vulcan scientist named T'Uerell. In trying to help her, he uncovers an elusive mystery that flows through to the eras of Kirk and Picard. Each captain only gets a handful of missions but they're held together by the mystery of this Vulcan scientist. We won't say more than that, but there's a definite showdown where things are (mostly) resolved.

Along the way, you'll find yourself battling against Klingons, Romulans and eventually Borg ships. While the endless space battles are kind of the point of the game, they do tend to get a bit repetitive early on. It seems like each new mission involves going to a new sector and blowing the holy hell out of everything you find. You'll have the occasional desire to use your scanners now and then or maybe transport an away team onto an enemy installation, but these are rare exceptions to the fighting that you'll usually be doing.

Once you move to The Next Generation things get a bit better. The missions here step away from the aggressive combat missions of the first two chapters to get at the heart of what Star Trek ought to be about. Though many Star Trek episodes involved some kind of ship battle, more often the main focus was on exploration, diplomatic negotiation, scientific research or supply runs. As Picard you'll have to protect a system from dangerous asteroids, seek out a Federation ship hidden in Romulan territory, and oversee planetary evacuations. After the constant shoot-em-ups of the Enterprise and Original Series missions, it's a nice change of pace.

You'll get the chance to captain each of the three Enterprises from the series as well as a variety of other Federation ships. Successful completion of mission objectives and lots of extra killing on the side will earn you command points that can be spent to add up to three other ships to your fleet. Unfortunately, the upgrade system that would allow these points to be spent to tweak each your ships' performance was scrapped.

While the system still lets you tailor your forces to your liking, there are a couple of problems with it. First, you'll have to buy ships before you find out what types of mission you're going on. Knowing whether you're going on a scouting run or a large-scale assault against an enemy starbase is definitely going to impact whether or not you load up with scouts and destroyers or with cruisers and battleships. The second problem is that the economy is a bit unbalanced. Early on, you'll be able to afford the best of the best. As you progress towards the more powerful ships of the Next Generation era, the command point rewards don't keep pace, leaving you unable to recover from losses as quickly.